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I thought a little bit about the TPC-H benchmark published by IBM yesterday. There is something in it, that leaves some question. The p570 is a 8 socket system. You can build it by stacking 4 two-socket boxes with some special cabling. That´s one of the points behind buying a p570. Nevertheless, the configuration of the benchmark didn´t worked that way. They had 32 of this p570 building bloacks and used this boxes as 32 distinct systems making the p570 buildingblocks to an expensive volume server. By using the capability to build bigger systems ot of those building blocks you would have 8 instead of 32 systems to manage.

The questions: What´s the reason of using such a configuration? Is there a scalability problem within the p570 giving you less return for the socket in bigger configurations ? What´s the impact to loads with higher dependencies between the partitions? I would like to see the performance numbers for a system with 32 p570 buildingblocks in 8 systems with an otherwise equal configuration.

Wow, it´s benchmarketing time at IBM again. IBM Announces DB2 and POWER6 Combo Trounces HP and Sun by 2x and 3x Respectively in New Business Intelligence Benchmark. IBM you are soooo great .... you was able to beat our TPC-H 10 TB by a factor of 3. It´s really an technological archievement in 2007 to beat a TPC-H benchmark result generated on on 29th November 2005 ... exactly 2 years ago today. Come on ... in IT 2 years are a fscking long time ....

Everytime i read a benchmark from IBM, i really looking forward to read their disclosure to see, what you can do in benchmarking, when you have nearly unlimited resources.

The configuration of IBM consists out of: 32 p6 p570 servers, each server had 32 GB of memory, resulting in 1 TB memory. Each of the systems had 96 36 Gigabyte 15k harddisks with 4 GB/s FC. A whooping amount of 3072 harddisks. A fully 10 GB enabled network.

The SF25K result was done on 1296 disk, with 10k rounds with 2 GB/s. The memory had a size of 288 GB. On a single system with a single operating system image The system used the old UltraSPARC with 1.5 GHz

Not that you can´t buy an system from Sun equivalent system from IBM. The venerable SF25k now has up to 1.15 TB per domain. And the M9000 class servers are a completly different story. But,dear IBM,when you want to make a statement of relative performance, the system should be at least somewhat similar.

So dear IBM, next time you want to showcase you system, don´t do it against a benchmark 2 years old. What´s the statement of such a press announcement: We are 3 times faster with our top of the line system with a benchmarking configuration than a 2 years old configuration. Big deal, IBM, really big deal ...